As the saying goes, "You can't fix stupid..." but maybe you can throw money at it. How would this tax be levied?. I don't run Windows on any PC I own, just my laptop for work.....

Don't know if you're using Linux and if so, which distro you're using......I was a diehard Kubuntu user and recently switched to OpenSuse 11.2 with KDE desktop. They have done a brilliant job integrating the look and feel of OO.org with the whole desktop. I haven't seen it devour more memory than usual but I don't use OO.org on any machine with less than 2 GB RAM which is basically a minimum on any PC you Get today. Take a look here:

http://images.google.com/images?q=opensuse%2011.2%20OpenOffice&oe=utf-8&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

It's not as simple as assigning a static IP......The VoIP phone is fed off of a gateway, router or cable modem etc that may have a static IP but.....the phone itself can be moved anywhere with a broadband connection and still register to the serving VoIP switch. I can take my Cisco phone in NY and bring it to California and have it register to the serving soft switch in NY without issue. Problem is that if I make a 911 call, emergency services will respond to where I originally had my phone registered in NY.

It's up to the customer to update their geographical/ PSAP location to have emergency services respond to the correct location. VoIp providers only have to provide the customers with the ability to update their geographic location for 911 purposes. There are 3rd party providers who handle that.

Google Dash911 or VIXXI

with kde-desktop and Kubuntu on another computer and I don't think that the desktop is that bad. I know this is offtopic, but I really wish they'd (Ubuntu) chuck pulse-audio. Have nothing but problems having an on-board sound component and a SBLive 5,1 PCI card. I didn't have any of these issue with ALSA.....sorry for the rant.

I stumbled on this gem a week or two back and it seems to work well. http://flowplayer.org/ It's a GPL3 replacement for flash player on websites. Never heard of it till last week.

I was going to say the same thing about the review and I assumed you must be new here but then I saw your user id.......never mind......carry on.

saying that I should be backing up my data, wipe the hard drive and do a complete install from scratch. For some people (like me) this may be cost-prohibitive.... I might only want to shell out for the Win7 upgrade and not the full retail install package. I've been very fortunate (and spoiled) because I've been using Linux and/or BSD for years which are much more fairly priced, if not free.

The only thing keeping me from getting a copy of Win 7 is cost. If I'm going to do the install it would be with Win 7 Professional at a minimum which I think is retailing for ~$140-$190 right now. That's a lot of scratch.

brilliant response. You, my friend, are a word-smith.

....but Ubuntu did not include the correct hardware recognition to set up the system. It also provides no easy method for me to report back those settings for others. If it was truly a manufacturer problem then I would still not be having sound.

That issue can be addressed by sending a copy of your dmesg output with the relevant messages to the developers. As a standard practice I would think the groups working on the distro would ask for that when shooting a trouble.

I've never seen a bigger piece of flamebait than this article. Stopped reading it half-way through cuz it's just LOADED with misinformation.

priceless....wish I had mod points for you

My word, I wish I had mod points for this. Brilliant.

This article is so one-sided it's not even funny:

Of course, Windows XP has shown that it handles netbooks with aplomb, and works with the web best of all, thanks to having all the browsers, plug-ins, downloads and more you could ever want, something you just canâ(TM)t claim with good old Linux.

He obviously has not used any Linux distro within the past 2-3 years. A plain vanilla install of Ubuntu, Fedora or even OpenSolaris can do all of that and then some. For free (as in beer).